The Land of Contrasts eBook

nobody appeared to relish it more than the hard-hit
Democrat. The Cleveland cry of “Four, four,
four years more” was met forcibly and effectively
with the simple adaptation, “Four, four, four
months more,” which proved the more prophetic
of that gentleman’s then stay at the White House.
At midnight, three days later, I was jammed in the
midst of a yelling crowd in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,
watching the electoral returns thrown by a stereopticon
light, as they arrived, on large white sheets.
Keener or more interested partisans I never saw; but
at the same time I never saw a more good-humored crowd.
If I encountered one policeman that night that was
all I did see; and the police reports next morning,
in a city of a million inhabitants let loose in the
streets on a public holiday, reported the arrest of
five drunk men and one pickpocket!

Election bets are often made payable in practical
jokes instead of in current coin. Thus, after
election day you will meet a defeated Republican wheeling
his Democratic friend through the chuckling crowd
in a wheelbarrow, or walking down the Bond Street of
his native town with a coal-black African laundress
on his arm. But in such forms of jesting as in
“White Hat Day,” at the Stock Exchange
of New York, Americans come perilously near the Londoner’s
standard of the truly funny.

In comparing American humour with English we must
take care that we take class for class. Those
of us who find it difficult to get up a laugh at Judge,
or Bill Nye, or Josh Billings, have at least to admit
that they are not quite so feeble as Ally Sloper
and other cognate English humorists. When we
reach the level of Artemus Ward, Ik Marvel, H.C.
Bunner, Frank Stockton, and Mark Twain, we may find
that we have no equally popular contemporary humorists
of equal excellence; and these are emphatically humorists
of a pure American type. If humour of a finer
point be demanded it seems to me that there are few,
if any, living English writers who can rival the delicate
satiric powers of a Henry James or the subtle suggestiveness
of Mr. W.D. Howells’ farces, for an analogy
to which we have to look to the best French work of
the kind. But this takes us beyond the scope of
this chapter, which deals merely with the humour of
the “Man on the Cars.”

FOOTNOTES:

[16] In an English issue of Artemus Ward, apparently
edited by Mr. John Camden Hotten (Chatto and Windus),
this passage is accompanied with the following gloss:
“Here again Artemus called in the aid of pleasant
banter as the most fitting apology for the atrocious
badness of the painting.”

This note is an excellent illustration of English
obtuseness—­if needed, on the part of the
reading public; if needless, on the part of the editor.